Blogtour review - Sharks by Simone Buchholz

Sharks (Chastity Riley)

Simone Buchholz (trans Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, 26 February 2026 
Available as: PB, 210pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781917764087

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of Sharks  to consider for review and to Anne for inviting me to join the blogtour.

Simone Buchholz's sequence of books about Chastity Riley, public prosecutor in Hamburg, is one of my favourite crime series. Starting with Blue Night and running through five stories up to River Clyde, we delve into Riley's troubled, deeply noir-tinged world. In the final book, we see her get some relief, perhaps.

But there is backstory! When Blue Night opens, Riley has already been through a lot, and Buchholz is now telling these stories which I think we previously published in German but are now being reworked, and then translated (again by the brilliant Rachel Ward). 

Sharks is I think the third part of Buchholz's reworking of the earlier Chastity Riley books, described as "Chastity reloaded" (a phrase which I feel could constitute an... interesting... proposition in ontological terms, but let's not go down that rabbit hole). We can therefore see the setting, and the circle of friends and lovers, forming that constitute the background for the later books, beginning at Blue Night. So inSharks, we see the origin of the Blue Night café itself, which features as a central location in the stories. We also see a fracture in Riley's relationship with her lover Klatsche.

We also, of course, see Riley, public prosecutor in Hamburg, grappling with a crime, the brutal double murder of two Americans in a squalid, run-down apartment building, leading into a world of double dealing and corruption in a district subject to gentrification. It's a well thought out plot strand that demonstrates Buchholtz's familiarity with the pulse (as it were) of Hamburg. It also shows the start of her involvement with Inceman - perhaps the beginning of a Chastity spiralling out of control as we see in the later books.

A feature of these stories is that Chastity's world, and that of her colleagues in the police and the prosecutors' office, is a distinctly menacing, unfriendly place. Often the best friends, the warmest comradeship, is with the petty crooks of Sankt Pauli, the people with whom Riley will gladly drink a night away. The higher up the ranks of officialdom we go, the further into wealth and power, the worse people get and the more dangerous the journey. That's doubly true in Sharks, and Riley faces additional danger as our girl is suffering from a chest infection. She may even have to give up smoking, that's how bad it is!

As ever though this feeds into a tangible sense that Chastity's not taking care of herself and she certainly won't allow anyone else to take care of her, so she makes a point of only quitting for a day or two. After that there's the business of self-punishment to resume. The only respite she allows herself is when she's supporting her friends, as she does when Carla is in crisis - which paints more background to the development of the group, as do manoeuvres to establish the Blue Night café which we see in operation in the later books.

Told in taut chapters, Sharks is classic noir, a book with an atmosphere so strong that one almost inhales, rather than reads, this story of late nights, insomnia, coffee, and cigarettes - a world that seems nocturnal even when the watery sun is in the sky. Buchholz layers on the mean streets, the meaner people, the need to release through drink and sex. But the book also provides some relief in the small joys of friendship - Riley supporting Carla for example, or making time to watch her favourite (failing) football team. 

It's less about the crime (though that is a satisfying mystery, taking us to some grim places physically and morally) than the little group of friends weathering the storm, trying to make something worthwhile and to endure.

Another lovely novel, one that contributes to the achievement this evolving series is. Chastity's always great to be around, and I really enjoyed this.

As ever Rachel Ward's translation is atmospheric, fun and nimble. The partnership of Buchholz and  Ward as delivers a sharp, bracing story with language that seems laconic and plain at first sight but where deep and treacherous subcurrents run. 

Strongly recommended.

For more information about Sharks, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Sharks from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Blogtour #Review - The Kitchen by Simone Buchholz

The Kitchen (Chastity Reloaded, 2)
Simone Buchholz (trans Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, 11 April 2024
Available as: PB, 226, PB, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781916788077

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for sending me a copy of The Kitchen to consider for review, and to Anne Cater for inviting me to join the book's Random Things blogtour.

It's SO GOOD to see Chastity Riley return. She must be the most morose woman in noir and, confusingly, every minute spent with her is a joy. Which may be a strange way to welcome what is a very, very dark story.

In this one, Chas is winding up a difficult case, a particularly distressing instance of trafficking which has left its young women victims especially traumatised. Getting her head round the ins and outs, Riley is convinced that the perps will go away for a very long time. We see her coming and going, doing her courtroom thing, as another case looms, one in which young men - possibly, abusive young men - have been dismembered. Somehow Riley can't work up her normal head of outrage over that.

Throughout the book, we are also invited into the head of another woman - or perhaps,  a series of women, it's not made clear - each short episode another example of abuse by men. It could be that this is a series of events befalling by one girl/ woman - the subject is growing older as they proceed - or it could be a potpourri of everyday outrages. Either alternative points at a grim reality. 

Closer to home, one of Riley's own circle also suffers, perhaps stoking her fury further.

As the city swelters in unaccustomed heat the resulting behaviour of its residents is mercilessly described and dissected in Riley's sardonic internal monologue, which remains as sharp as ever, indeed knife-keen when it comes to the abuse suffered by women. There is a sense that in The Kitchen events are especially aligned with Riley's sensibility. It's as though, attuned to the unheard vibrations of her familiar Hamburg, Riley now finds herself in such sympathy with them that she and the city are in resonance, in such harmony that she encapsulates and articulates the pain suffered by Hamburg's women as well as the deep sense of injustice when nothing is done about it. The fact that those doing the nothing are often Chas' colleagues only heightens the tension. Surely, one feels by the end of this story, some revelation must at hand? 

While of course some of Riley's usual gang do feature, the sense of her leading her crew is rather muted. She feels much more on her own than normal (and that's saying something, I know). Yes, Klatsche is around, Riley both reaching for him and pushing him away. Yes, her team are at work. But there's a muffled quality to Riley's work here, she only really seems to sharpen up when she's catching up with retired Faller, who's taken to sitting outside an old lighthouse ostensibly fishing. There seems to be a deep communication between the ex-colleagues, though at a level that isn't put into words for us, the readers.

So, as ever, Chastity Riley makes her murky way though the murky city, navigating by tapping into the strange rhythms and currents of nighttime Hamburg, a kind of pilotfish for her more orthodox colleagues, feeling what they don't feel and suffering wounds that they don't, or won't, see. Deeply alone, even more so than usually, hers are the insights that will crack open the case, and on her shoulders will fall the moral the moral decisions that will result. How does she bear it? Drink and cigarettes, in the main, it seems.

I'd strongly recommend The Kitchen. It isn't a nice book - you just have no idea! - but it is a neat one, an intense story deftly communicated by both author and translator (Rachel Ward is on top form here, conveying the little sallies and the flavour of Riley's deceptively stable but not really narration).

For more information about The Kitchen, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Kitchen from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Blogtour #Review - The Acapulco by Simone Buchholz

The Acapulco (Chastity Reloaded)
Simone Buchholtz (Trans Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, date, 27 April 2023
Available as: PB, 243pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB/ PB): 

I'm grateful to Orenda for sending me a copy of The Acapulco to consider for review, and to Anne Cater for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

It's always good to catch up with Chastity Riley's life. We last saw the Hamburg based State prosecutor getting a measure of closure over her family history in a visit to Glasgow. In The Acapulco, though, we don't get the next story - we're back to the beginning and able to read, for the first time in English, the first book. So we perhaps see a slightly less moody Riley than we're used to and those around her aren't, as it were, quite in their familiar settings.

Hamburg is still, though, throwing grim mysteries Chastity's way. Young women - dancers from the Acapulco club - are being murdered and mutilated, and Riley finds that something about the case makes it difficult for her to get into the mind of the murderer, her usual approach in investigating crimes. That family history, which is hinted at here (though if you've been reading these books you'll know a bit more than is directly stated) may be messing with her. Or it may be something else...

The study of a Chastity coming apart at the seams, so to speak, is as brutal but also as touching as ever. Drinking too much, smoking too much, her personal and professional lives both muddled and decaying, it's impossible to say whether she is suffering because she is trying to box in and control desperate underlying pain and trauma, or because she's failing to do that, and it is overwhelming her.

Also as ever, salvation seems to come from that small circle of friends, some of whom seem to bring a modicum of normality and sanity (though others, not so much - I'm looking at you, Klatsche.)

These are books where the noir atmosphere almost seems to take tangible form, a neon-lit, smoky, netherworld that has substance and personality all of its own, breeding both monsters and moments of beauty. Reading them - The Acapulco, if anything, even more than the others - is like being bathed in silver nitrate then dyed monochrome and developing-lamp red and transported inside the silver screen to sit in a corner of that club, that bar, simultaneously in 2020s Hamburg and a 1940s Hollywood flick, close - indeed at times, almost too close - to the action.

The writing - magnificently translated by Rachel Ward - is punchy, allusive, knowing, done in broken sentences and rueful, suggestive lines. Fittingly for the book that kicked it all off, unlike in some of the others, the point of view is all Riley's (apart from some interspersed sections which I'm not commenting on for spoiler related reasons) giving this story a very narrated quality - you can almost imagine her voice as a commentary to the film, sorry, the book. That also means there is little sense of what is happening out of view, with the atrocities committed by the serial killer coming as increasingly jarring, unpredictable shocks.

It is a short book but powerful, punchy and very dark. I found it hard to put down, even sitting reading it in the cinema in the gloom before the films started.

A magnificent addition to this sequence.

For more information about The Acapulco, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Acapulco from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon. 

#Blogtour #Review - Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz

Hotel Cartagena (Chastity Riley, 4)
Simone Buchholz (trans Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, 4 March 2021
Available as: PB, 214pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy 
ISBN: 9781913193546

I'm honoured to be taking part in the blog tour for Hotel Cartagena, and grateful to Orenda Books and to Anne at Random Things Tours for providing a copy of the book and inviting me to take part.

Well, this one is certainly something different!

I've been following the Chastity Riley stories from the beginning and thought I knew what to expect, but in this fourth episode Buchholz  shakes things up somewhat. In fact she throws all the rules out of the window - the window being that of a 20th storey hotel bar above the Hamburg docks. That's where Riley has come with her collection of damaged friends and colleagues to celebrate Faller's birthday. Yes, it's an office party (of sorts) for Hamburg's CID and their hangers on, and as you will expect if you think about that for a moment, it turns out not to be an ordinary party AT ALL.

The gang's all here - introduced one by one: Faller, Brückner, Calabretta, Klatsche, Carla, Rocco, Stanislawski, Riley herself of course - with their placing carefully spelled out. Even before anything else happens, Riley notes the tensions and suggests that 'we have a situation'. 

And then, hostage takers storm the bar...

This is therefore in many respects a very different book from the previous ones in the series, which all follow the patten of a criminal investigation - but also, very similar, in that the same people are present (except for one), the atmosphere - a kind of exhausted noir - is the same, and the ultimate motivation for what happens is rooted in the same criminal underworld. 

We get the familiar punchy, irony-laden chapters narrating both events in the bar (from Riley's point of view - 'I'm just the rather confusing type of woman') and, going back several decades, the life of a man - Henning, later Henk - who is intimately related to what happens. His is a compelling life history, even though told in miniature (this is a short book and Henning is only part of it). Buchholz gives us, in a relatively small space, a deep feeling for this man who, on a whim, hopped on a ship and worked his passage to South America (you can still do that?), found a home, fell in love... and suffered unimaginably. 

It's also a heist, because what happened to Henk underlies a complex, carefully planned operation in the attack on the hotel bar. We see this unfold, and some of the planning and preparation, at the same time as the police response and the dramatic endgame. One of the crew is missing from the bar: Stepanovic got distracted by a pretty face on his way to the party, so ends up shivering in a tent in the street, playing at being a hostage negotiator (it gives him an in, at least). Personal life and police work come into conflict as the various men with whom Riley is, or has been, involved (again, 'I'm just the rather confusing type of woman') endure the waiting, trying to work some angle with kidnappers or authorities).

And all the time, the clock is ticking.

We've seen all these characters before, generally in Carla and Rocco's bar. They are free spirits who have come and gone through the pages of Buchholz's stories. Now she has, rather cruelly, constrained them. It's almost a laboratory experiment, a test of how all the distinct personalities we've come to know and, yes I'll say it, love, will change under extreme conditions. 

But Hotel Cartagena is much more than that. As I've said, Henning/ Henk's story is compelling and his development as a person is riveting and all to credible. The previous books sketched the Hamburg underworld for us as a pretty dark, dangerous place but Hotel Cartagena makes it seem like a kindergarten, compared with the more elementary, more ruthless world that Henk stumbles into.

As ever, Rachel Ward's translation here is sharp, lucid and colloquial. Some chapters verge on poetry, rendered in terse, rapt lines. In other places we get dreadful puns ('The Wurst is yet to Come' - literally true for one character). Always, the deadpan tone of Riley's internal monologue, the dry wonder at how bad things can get, is maintained, the effect building through the book until a final, unexpected climax that knocked me right off balance. 

There's a change of pace, a rising of the stakes, in Hotel Cartagena, compared with its predecessors which makes it - and I would have thought this next to impossible - even better than they were, even tenser, even darker. At the same time I think there is also a sense that under the pressure, some block in Riley, something which has trapped her in her familiar sardonic circles, has shifted and she may be on the move. To what effect, we'll have to wait and see in future books - which I'm now very impatient for!

If you haven't been reading this series (in which case I envy you about to discover it all for the first time!) Hotel Cartagena would be a good place to begin, giving a taste of the mood and tone - and the characters - without being spoilery about earlier events. 

For more information about Hotel Cartagena, see the Orenda Books website here - and the marvellous blog tour entries on the poster below.

You can buy Hotel Cartagena online from UK Bookshop dot org, from Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon. And also of course from your local bookshop if they are doing click-and-collect, as many are. (For my local shop it's more of a "David-sends-email-and-collect" and if I'm lucky they have the book in anyway so actually much quicker...)

#Blogtour #Review - Mexico Street by Simone Buchholz

Mexico Street (Chastity Riley 3)

Cover design by kid-ethic

Simone Buchholtz (trans Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, 5 March 2020
PB, e, 227pp

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for a free advance copy of Mexico Street and to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for inviting me to take part in the blog tour.

If you've read Buchholz's previous books, Blue Night and Beton Rouge, you'll know to expect the doom, pared down, noirish atmosphere, the short chapters, the sense of desolation as Chastity Riley, Hamburg state prosecutor, narrates her life. The language is so hard, so abstracted that sections read almost as prose poetry and on the surface it is so bleak that it could repel if it weren't for a streak of, I don't know, a... something... in Riley's tone, a self-knowingness, a sardonic interest in the world's follies and failures that keeps her, and therefore us, engaged.

In this third bulletin from Riley's life we find her even more moodily lonely. She seems to be smoking more (how?) drinking more, and to be losing even the limited family she had: no Klatschke, of course - his flat a looming emptiness in Riley's psyche - so we don't see the bar but we hardly vist Rocco and Carla's café either and those cosy, spontaneous evenings where the place goes from public bar to family party without trying seem long gone, the little coterie split and uneasy.

Rather, much of the book's airtime is given over to Riley's and her colleagues' investigation of a young man dragged barely alive from a burning car (in this book, cars are burning everywhere - night by night the fires spread across Germany, then Europe, until news bulletins begin to report them from all around the world). Tracing what happened to him leads her to a secretive group of families living by crime on the fringes of German society, an interrelated web of feuding cousins and macho fathers and brothers (and trampled wives, sisters and daughters). Buchholtz writes movingly of the plight of these women and sympathy for them is one thing that prods Riley out of her ennui.

I always enjoy the Chastity Riley books, not only because they have a uniquely dark vision of life but because Buchholtz shows how this darkness coexists with blissful, unaware, lives often very close (geographically or emotionally - I suppose that's why I missed those evenings Riley used to enjoy the café). Well, that contrast was never so strong as in Mexico Street and alongside Riley's investigation we also see, sketched out, lives on the dark side of that wall and the voices of those who want out. It makes for compulsive, if disturbing, reading, the end in one sense already determined by the opening of the book but also wide open as there are people out there Buchholz has made us care for, care about (despite the bleakness! Despite the darkness!) and we want to know more about them

It's a short book but, my goodness, it packs in a tremendous amount. And Rachel Ward's translation serves the story, serves the mood, so well too.

Recommended without hesitation.

For more about Mexico Street see the Orenda Books website here.

You can buy the book from your local bookshop, or online via Hive Books who support high street bookshops, or from Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

The tour continues - look at the poster below for the wonderful bloggers lined up for this book!

Review - Beton Rouge by Simone Buchholz

Beton Rouge (translated  from the German by Rachel Ward)
Simone Buchholz
Orenda Books, 21 February 2019
PB, e 186pp

Today I'm joining the tour for Simone Buchholz's dark new thriller, Beton Rouge. I'm very grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for an advance (free) copy of the book, and to Anne from Random Things Blogtours for inviting me to take part in the tour.

Chastity Riley, unconventional public prosecutor and habitué of Hamburg's seamier nightlife, returns in a sequel to last year's Blue Night. Still chain-smoking, still drinking far too much, still brooding on her life and loves, Riley is a protagonist who makes an impact, much as if she'd reached out of the book with a steel bar and whacked the reader across the head. Blue Night introduced her doomy background in parallel with a fairly complex case that touched closely on her and her circle. In contrast, Beton Rouge has at its heart a simpler, more freestanding case, but it comes at a point where her and friends are going through some dark times.

Simone Buchholz

As the book opens a man has been found naked, assaulted, imprisoned in a cage and left outside the entrance to one of Germany's most successful magazine groups. Who he is, what happened to him, and why, will only slowly emerge: a story of bullying, privilege, misuse of power and ignored voices that will take Riley and her new colleague Ivo Stepanovic to Bavaria in a search for answers in the past.

Buchholz's characterisation of Bavaria as a kind of rural Hell is fascinating and disturbing, adding to the deep loathing we've already seen Riley display towards the countryside by painting the region as mean-minded, both nosy about neighbours' business and at the same time inclined to turn a blind eye to all kinds of abuses and discontents.

Hamburg, for all its sleaze, feels far safer even though the journey to Bavaria - and the distance from home - allows Riley to brood on her on-off relationship with Klatschke, where something seems to be wrong. Riley relentlessly dissects that relationship, in the same breath as considering the case in hand - indeed, drawing up lists of questions to be answered mixing both issues around Klatschke and about the case.

I think that tendency to mix things up is part of what makes her such an intriguing protagonist. What she's effectively doing here is not only investigating crimes but approaching her personal life using exactly the same tools and techniques (including the deadpan, wisecracking internal monologue). That wasn't so clear in Blue Night because there the case itself got personal, but here it's very starkly depicted, whether in relation to Klatsche or when problems also arise between her friends Carla and Rocco. The group of friends seems to be under great strain - maybe Riley will soon have no-one left but herself to rely on?

This is all delightfully noir, a mood Buchholz gleefully plays up in the writing (and that Ward adeptly conveys in her deeply readable translation) with Chastity left doubtful about her future, brooding on her past and living, really, like her new colleague, very much in the present.

An excellent book, deeply moody, atmospheric and evocative.

Blogtour review - Blue Night by Simone Buchholz

Blue Night (Chastity Riley, 1)
Simone Buchholz (trans by Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, 28 February 2018
PB, 182pp

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for an advance copy of Blue Night and for inviting me to take part in the blogtour.

Blue Night is the first in a series featuring Hamburg public prosecutor Chastity Riley. Her (to me) unlikely name and some of the flashback detail hints at a foreign (non German) background and the flashbacks at a tragedy in her early life but we have yet to hear details of those. Watch this space.

In the meantime, we have Chastity's recent history: sidelined by her office for exposing a senior prosecutor as corrupt, she's been assigned to witness protection but seemingly in a very vague role that keeps her at arm's length from the rest of the department.

That seems to suit Chastity down to the ground, giving her maximum freedom to indulge her loner tendencies, manifested especially by chain-smoking, heavy drinking and gazing moodily at Hamburg's admittedly awful (at least, according to this book) weather. That may sound rather off-putting but in Buchholz's hands it's actually rather appealing. Chastity's little world - bounded by her flat, the Blue Night bar run by her friend Klatsche, and the cafe/ restaurant belonging to Rocco and Carla - is fully detailed (when off duty, she has a tendency to end up working behind the bar if someone has to rush away on an urgent errand) and peopled (add to the above her ex boss Calabretta and retired colleague Faller - about whom, for different reasons, the group of friends are worried). One senses that these are real people, with real histories: this is heightened by occasional chapters starting from 1982 which and feature thoughts of the principal characters as they move towards the present-day story. It's a very effective device, like overhearing the internal monologue of characters waiting to step out onto a stage. (And it also includes figures who aren't identified till well into the story, so hinting at the role they will play).

Simone Buchholz

Into this somewhat Bohemian world comes Joe, victim of a gang attack whom Chastity is charged with guarding. She begins work on him, coaxing out his story and joining the dots between it and the wider world of crime in Hamburg. But if she learns too much, will this place her - and her friends, especially some who have past connection in the underworld - at risk?

The crime background to this book isn't, in the end, particularly complicated nor is it the most interesting part of the book. Wisely, in my view, especially given this is a relatively short book, Buchholz spends most of her time on Chastity's relationships with her circle of friends and with Joe. The result works very well, whether seen as a study of character, a slice of noir (I should write Noir, this book has it in (Sam) spades) or as mainly laying foundations for what I hope will be a future series.

The language is a joy. Take the opening words

Under a dark sky the engine gives one last cough, clears its throat like an old man, then floods.
I get out, sit on the rusty-gold bonnet, and raise my face to the heavy, cold air.
Cigarette.
First things first: I'm going to smoke this damn fog dry.

or

I can't stop staring at the damn moon.
I smoke another three to eight cigarettes, and someone knocks on the door, two long, three short.

This must reflect, I think, an especially fruitful collaboration between Buchholz and translator Rachel Ward, I don't, of course, know how the original German reads (it would be beyond my ancient "o"-level ability anyway) but the English is simply addictive. I also loved the chapter titles, gloriously elaborate confections such as "Candles all round, please", "I'd like to go somewhere, right now, where I can smoke" or "Because it's Sunday" which tend to reflect Chastity's state of mind more than the progress of the story, as well as giving the merest hint of how she senses the atmosphere in colour, reads a crime scene for the touch of a murderer, knows when something's about to go down. It isn't painted as a sixth sense or a mystical ability but does come across as Chastity being very much in her element in those mean streets as the late drinkers head home and the litter blows down the Reeperbahn.

Simply an excellent slice of atmospheric crime. Give me more, soon!